The best driving road in the world?

The Transfagarasan Highway might be a mouthful to say but it's fun to ride.

25 August 2011David Morley

Edge ... the hairpins aren?t for the timid rider.

If you?re a fan of television?s British Top Gear series, you?ll probably have heard of this road. It?s called the Transfagarasan Highway and it was rated by the Top Gear trio as the best driving road (wait for Jeremy Clarksonesque pause) in the world.

It is a very difficult point to argue, other than to say that it?s also probably one of the best roads for two wheelers on the planet.

The crazy thing is, I discovered the highway about a year before Top Gear did but in my case it was a pure fluke.

Heading north through Romania, our party of four carried by three decrepit eBay Yamahas found itself on a remote, Romanian back-road.

Clearly a holiday/camping destination for the Romanian working classes, the area was dotted with campsites and semi-clad, middle-aged Romanians.

The road up the side of the Carpathian Mountains was little more than a goat-track; all the original bitumen was a memory and a hundred generations of repair patches remained.

The road was so rough we had to stop to tighten our luggage racks, as they were threatening to jump ship after hours of a 60km/h pounding.

Then, as we reached the highest point, near Balea Lake, we piled into a long, unlit tunnel, expecting more pain on the run down the other side of the Carpathians. Instead, we spilled out of the tunnel into a surreal scene.

Laid out the length of the valley before us was the Transfagarasan Highway, a truly monumental road in anybody?s language.

Aches, pains and loose luggage were soon behind us aswe swung fromhairpin to hairpin, thankful for the superb cambering and alignment job of the engineers and surveyors and the attention to detail of those who laid the surface.

The highway swoops and climbs up over crests and along valley floors. You can ride it fast for the thrill or slowly for the scenery and, if you get lucky, you won?t see a dozen vehicles along the route?s 90 kilometres.

But despite the excellence of the road-making, the Transfagarasan is a dangerous ride. Plenty of people have been killed by brake failure on the long downhill stretches, or simply getting it wrong and plunging down of drops up to 350 metres.

Towards the northern end of the highway, the terrain levels out before you join the main road that plonks you into the city of Piteti.

The crazy thing is that even though the Transfagarasan Highway is a superb piece of engineering, it?s a true anomaly in Romania. As of right now, Romania has the fewest kilometres of motorway-standard road in the European Union. So how does it come to have this stunning piece?

The answer depends on who you ask. Some say the road was built (between 1970 and 1974) to ensure military supply lines across the Carpathians as a knee-jerk reaction by Romania?s then-ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, in the aftermath of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

None of which explains why he waited two years to start or why the road to Balea Lake is so magnificent, yet the route beyond is a pothole-fest.

The second theory is that Ceausescu built the road to show the rest of the world he could build a road the equal of anything else, even if it took an alleged 6 million kilograms of dynamiteand cost 40 lives. It fits with the whole despot thing and it?s my favourite theory by a long chalk.

One thing Ceausescu couldn?t do anything about, though, was the weather in that part of the world; the road is often closed between October and June because of snow.

Fog can be a problem, too, as can mobs of sheep under the loose control of local shepherds.

If you just want to get across or around the Carpathian Mountains, there are simpler, safer ways but if you call yourself a bike enthusiast, you need to ride the Transfagarasan Highway.